Adrian Covert

What's better than a quantum computer? A quantum computer in a diamond, duh. And if you're asking why we need a quantum computer inside a diamond, well, may god have mercy on your joyless soul.

According to Nature magazine, researchers used the natural flaws found in diamonds to forge qubits. Qubits, as ZDnet points out, are rather unstable since they can simultaneously encode 0s and 1s, but this new diamond-based solution makes those qubits considerably more reliable.

The researchers used microwave pulses to continually switch the direction of the electron spin rotation, a trick which protects the system against decoherence. "It's a little like time travel," Lidar said, because switching the direction of rotation time-reverses the inconsistencies in motion as the qubits move back to their original position.

Such research also yields such wonderful sentences as "here we present the integration of dynamical decoupling into quantum gates for a standard hybrid system, the electron–nuclear spin register."